War Aeternus 2: Sacrifices

by Charles Dean

  System, that felt like more than 12%. How much of my mana was used? Lee asked, not having the mana bar handy to instantly check.

  You used 35.4% of your mana to shape the object below.

  The system’s answer puzzled Lee as he had mentally calculated out roughly 12%, not almost 36%. Wait, no, that’s right. This isn’t iron I’m shaping. It’s steel! Of course it would require a different amount! Lee felt like an idiot. Why didn’t I think about that? He wanted to hit himself. If he had tried to show off any more, it could have eaten up all of his spirit and caused him to suffer a mental backlash.

  “What’s with the face? Did the trick not work?” Wolfe reached for the napkin only to have his hand swiped away. “Do I need to distract them with tales of that one time you and I got drunk at that bar in Fukuoka? What was it called? Happy C--”

  “Nope!” Lee declared, instantly interrupting that story. “Nope. No no no. No one needs to hear that story, and nothing is wrong with the trick. In fact, it’s done.” Lee pulled the napkin away and revealed a small steel statue.

  Wolfe was the first one to respond, and his one word seemed to encapsulate the mood.

  “Woah,” he said, his mouth hung agape.

  “That’s . . . that’s stunning . . .” Olga commented.

  Masha turned a new shade of red and silently bit her lip as she stared at the statue.

  “Go ahead. It’s for you,” Lee said, picking up the statuette and handing it to Masha. “I think it will suit you nicely.”

  “I . . . I can’t take this.” She shook her head, trying to reject the gift, but she didn’t put up much of an effort as Lee simply pushed the statue into the palms of her hands.

  “It looks just like her,” Olga marveled. It was a replica of Masha in the outfit she was wearing that day, except she was also riding a giant tortoise that looked like it was wearing armor.

  “Holy crap, man, how did you . . . What did you? Dear God, brother, your game has exceeded mine!” Wolfe exclaimed, drawing attention to the table. “That’s it. I give up. I thought I knew you! I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU!” Wolfe stood up dramatically. “But lo! Lo and behold, I knew NOTHING!”

  “Is that how it is?!” Lee feigned indignance and didn’t even try to quiet his friend down as Wolfe flexed his acting chops. Normally, Lee would have cracked and offered to tell Wolfe how he did the trick--or whatever Wolfe was after--just to get his friend to sit down and stop making a scene. This time, however, after having to deal with his miniature, cult-like speeches at the bar in Satterfield and Miller’s constant, overly-energetic and enthusiastic behavior, he didn’t really care. Augustus had once told him that you reach a point when you realize that the people laughing at you never cared about you, and the people having fun with you are thankful you’re being silly, so it’s easier to just let loose. As such, Lee just went with it. “Is that how it’s going to be? You’re just going to throw our history away because of one tiny thing?”

  “Yeah, that’s how it is.” Wolfe looked surprised for a second but then carried on. “All of these years, and you never thought to tell me you were a Russian sleeper agent with mystical, magical powers?”

  “Well, maybe I could have trusted you more if you hadn’t told people about the secret to my origin story!” Lee declared.

  “Please stop! You two are embarrassing us!” Olga proclaimed, interrupting Lee before he could make up a ridiculous story about being bitten by a radioactive gargoyle.

  Lee and Wolfe looked over to see that she had turned red and that Masha had buried her face in her hands. The two men exchanged a meaningful look with each other, chuckled, and then sat back down.

  Wolfe waited a moment and said, “I’m still not cool with the spy-level double-agent secrecy you got going on here. It just ain’t good. We’ve been friends forever. You should have helped me--” Wolfe censored himself. Lee knew he wanted to say that he should have helped him pick up a Russian chick sooner, but with Masha and Olga right there, neither could finish that sentence without making things more awkward than they already were. “You should have helped me by translating the Russian movies I could have pirated. It would have saved me a bunch of money on movie tickets.” Wolfe tried to make a recovery, but from Olga’s growing scowl, Lee reckoned at least one audience member didn’t buy it. As he looked over at Olga, he noticed that there was a kid with his parents behind her, holding up a phone and pointing it at the table. Crap, as if the gorilla incident over a month ago wasn’t enough of a publicity issue.

  “As touching as this bromance conflict is, why don’t we just enjoy the drinks and go to the movies, okay?” Olga asked.

  “Do you speak any other languages you haven’t told people?” Masha asked, finally picking her head up. “You’re not actually a spy, are you?”

  Lee snickered at the question. “If I were, do you think I’d tell you? I wouldn’t say it’s that I speak other languages, I just think that you’d be hard-pressed to find a language I can’t speak and understand.”

  The entire table stared at him. “Wait, really?” Masha asked as Wolfe stared at Lee, his left eye giving the occasional twitch.

  “Yeah, really,” Lee answered honestly. There was a small voice in the back of his head telling him that he shouldn’t be so forthcoming, but he didn’t see any reason to lie to the people at the table.

  “Hmm . . .” Wolfe stroked his chin contemplatively and remained silent as the conversation turned back to drinks.

  The rest of brunch, they talked about the movies they were about to see, the books that had inspired them and their favorite games. Lee was rather surprised to find out the two girls played games at all. They didn’t play MMOs like Wolfe and Lee, but they were very big on what Lee often referred to as ‘fetch games.’ These were the type of game where people spent hours chasing achievements in a repetitive environment that claimed to be open world. As much as Lee would have liked to mock those types, he actually liked them too. They scratched an itch in his brain that sometimes just needed scratching.

  Afterward, Lee and the two girls went to the movies, while Wolfe ended up excusing himself. Although Lee wasn’t sure why, he knew that his friend was mad about something. It wasn’t like he minded, but no amount of anger had ever made Wolfe walk away from a date with a nice woman. Still, Lee was able to sit smack dab between two amazing-looking women and watch movies, so it was such a change of pace from the world he had been in. Even if he hadn’t been there for a prolonged period, the adventures he had experienced had been enough to make him feel like this world, his home world that he had spent decades in, was the strange and foreign land. This was the world that felt more like a vacation away from reality than it did somewhere that he had worked and lived for years.

  It was actually something that he had thought about a bit when he had come home for a while after killing the last Herald. As best he could figure, it was most likely due to how intense the other world was. Every action, every thought, every move or slight hesitation could shape or change people’s lives, and even lead to their--or even his--death. Every decision he made, even the split-second choices he made in the heat of battle, carried an absolutely-enormous amount of stress with them. Even if he wasn’t conscious of it at the time, he often replayed the scenes back through his mind at night, ruminating over whether or not he had made the proper decision.

  The colosseum, the racist guards, the brutal, and the out-of-nowhere beatings that made no sense had done so much to break him, even if he didn’t want to admit it. He wasn’t the same man that he had been before going in. He had lost his recalcitrant senses of propriety and agency that had once been ingrained into him. That loss was what had let him make a scene with Wolfe. He was able to simply shrug off people’s stares and attention and carry on regardless of what they might think of him. It was the same thing that had allowed him to act like an idiot to the crowd at the colosseum, flaunting his defiance in their faces as he took on the role of a braggadocios blowhard. Their treatment, their push to shame a
nd belittle him, had made him shameless. They had tried to force him into behaving the way they wanted, and he had turned into a rebel. Truthfully, those changes left him with mixed emotions. Even if the Firbolgs hadn’t succeeded in sculpting who he was, they had still changed him. The whole experience had come perfectly at the end of one of the most stressful weeks, when he was at his most malleable, and it had changed him.

  At one point, even though he was comfortably watching people in a movie, he was tempted to just get up and go start on the tasks he had assigned himself for this trip. He actually had to force himself to sit and relax and not just get up and go back to work for Satterfield’s sake. No, relax. You can take a little time off, whether you take a day or a millennium, it won’t matter in that world. You need to de-stress. Even though he knew he wasn’t really wasting time, since he had as much time as he needed, it was hard to reconcile that in his head.

  Lee was actually pretty happy with the fact that the movie theaters served beer since it helped with the stress relief a good bit. That plus a drink at lunch in between films left him feeling pretty chilled. Unfortunately, his steady imbibing throughout the day also meant that Lee was still far too tipsy to drive the girls home when the movies were over. Olga lived downtown like Lee, but apparently Masha lived far enough away that a car would have been convenient. Masha said she really had no problem walking and preferred it over public transportation, but she also told Lee that the walk was going to take a while. When Olga gave him a ‘what are you waiting for?’ glance, he took the hint and was more than happy to oblige. Lee took the opportunity to volunteer his services to walk Masha home. On the way, Lee enjoyed the benefits of his improved Charisma and Intelligence stats in making conversation. Eventually, the witty remarks and clever jokes gave way to more personal topics.

  “So, do you ever think about going back, or . . . going there in the first place, I guess? I don’t think you’ve told me where you’re actually from,” Lee asked as they stepped off the sidewalk and into what looked like a large park Lee had never noticed before. It was rather empty for a park just after sunset.

  “To Russia? No, I’ve thought about it, but I’m from here in all ways that matter,” Masha answered, edging close enough to Lee that the hairs on his arm brushed against her.

  Is it okay to go for a hand hold? We’re not officially dating . . . but . . . Lee looked over, painfully aware of the fact that he was second-guessing himself. This felt like a date, but he was just walking a girl home. Screw it. What’s the worst that could happen? Lee reached over and grabbed her hand in the least subtle, most awkward way possible. Masha didn’t refuse, though, and she even did her best to acquiesce, tightening her grip around his hand in a vote of confidence for a moment.

  “I don’t think many ways matter when it comes to where you’re from,” Lee said, picking the conversation up a moment later.

  “No, they don’t,” Masha replied. “I grew up only talking to people from Russia since my father had me homeschooled, but I’ve spent more time here than most people. I love it here. I love the movies, the drinks, my close friends like yo--” Masha, who had turned to look at Lee as she was talking, blushed and turned her head away before she finished the word ‘you.’

  “Well, I like you too,” Lee said and looked at her with the first completely-genuine smile he’d had for days. “But yeah, I know what you mean. So, homeschooled? That must have been fun. Is that why you started getting more heavily into church stuff? A way to socialize?”

  “You could say that. It wasn’t fun having a birthday party that no one showed up to. I complained to my dad that I needed to go to a real school to make friends, but he just told me, ‘Your circumstance is just the easiest thing to blame. Change what you give if you want to change what you receive.’ I don’t think I understood it at all when I was younger, but my uncle said it basically meant I needed to just look harder at what I could do with other kids. The church was just the easiest solution, since, by default, they always met on the days I had off from homeschool.”

  Lee nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “So why didn’t you tell your friend?” Masha asked, bringing the topic back to Wolfe, the languages and the magic tricks. “If you could do all of those cool things, why didn’t you tell Wolfe you were spending time learning other languages?”

  “Hmm?” Lee slowed down as he pondered the question. The honest answer was that he hadn’t spent much time learning any of the languages at all. Instead, he had a cheat system that carried over from Augustus’s demented life-or-death game that acted like the best translation app in existence. “I don’t know.”

  “It seems like something you would tell him . . . unless he’s right. Unless you really are a secret agent,” Masha giggled.

  “Yeah, it is something I should have told him.” Except . . . How?

  “Were you worried it would tip the balance?” Masha asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Relationships are usually built on balance. If one person feels like they are inferior, it might upset the nature of the friendship. Maybe you’re worried that, if he knew you had all of these talents and abilities, it might have upset the balance of the friendship.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” Lee responded doubtfully. How could one person having something good for them affect their relationship with someone else? It can only improve it, right?

  “I wish I didn’t believe it either. I’ve just seen it so often. If someone learns you’re rich, they go from wanting to be your friend to sometimes wanting something from you and sometimes just not hanging out with you. It makes distance where there was none. It’s like the priest at our church: even though everyone knows he is just a person, no different than you or me, they all treat him differently. I think he mentioned that you were one of the few people that didn’t treat him like a preacher and instead just talked to him like he was a person last time we spoke. That’s something I liked about you.”

  “Are you sure you just didn’t like my rugged good looks?” Lee borrowed one of Wolfe’s deflection lines when she mentioned liking him, but he wasn’t sure why. The topic didn’t deserve to be belittled with too many jokes. “No, I think I know what you mean.” He had been going through that with the townsfolk from Satterfield. He actually liked Miller the best because, even if he called Lee the ‘son of a god,’ he still did his best to treat him like a noob. To Miller, Lee was nothing more than a preacher who had been pushed into playing hero. “I’ve gone through that a lot myself.”

  “Me too,” Masha sighed with a frown. “Too often.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re short on friends, though. Olga seems great. And what about that guy who volunteers with you on occasion?”

  “Him? He’s . . . He’s someone who works with my dad. He’s not my friend, even if I might have mistakenly thought he was once. You can’t be friends with people who see you as an assignment . . .” Masha muttered the last sentence in such a low voice that Lee could barely make out the words despite being right next to her.

  An assignment? Lee recoiled at the statement. He understood a bit about what it was like to have status separate him and others, not by his own design but by theirs, but he had no idea about her word choice. “So not to shoot my good luck in the foot . . .” Lee began, changing topics and moving to the question that most guys in his situation wanted to ask but probably shouldn’t. “What made you brave up so much to come after me? There are plenty of other guys that you talk to way more at the office and at the church.”

  “Ah. . .” Masha paused. “I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe just your aura? You feel different, like you’re special.” She took her time as she searched for each word individually. “When most guys talk to me, I feel like a prize or an object or a goal but . . .” She slowed her steps to match the halting pace of her words and said,” I must be stupid. This is such a dumb reason, but with you . . . With you, it always feels like I am average. I am just a person. I am not pr
ettier than the next girl, an object to be won, and my status isn’t special, and who I am doesn’t matter. I just feel like a normal person when I’m with you. That’s all I want sometimes. Maybe, in that way, I’m using you. You don’t mind, do you? You don’t mind if I want to go out with you just so I feel average? That’s not mean or insulting, is it?”

  “No, of course not. I’m just happy you showed up. Your timing couldn’t have been better.” Lee gave her his best smile, and he couldn’t help but feel like his Charisma stat was at play. The rest of what she said might have only amounted to ‘I went after you because you were the only guy who didn’t go after me,’ but the sentence about the aura, that definitely smelled of a decent Charisma stat.

  Wait . . . What does she mean by ‘status’? He wanted to ask but held back. She had just said that she wanted to feel normal, like everyone else, so bringing it up probably wasn’t the best idea. Lee bit his tongue. If she doesn’t want to tell me, then that’s fine.

  Suddenly, for some reason, even though they were in the middle of a beautiful park, Lee’s combat instincts made him panic. It could have been the fact that the entire park was empty and devoid of wildlife, yet he could swear he had heard something rustle the leaves.

  Then everything went quiet. He knew what came next once the noise stopped, and it made his heart pound. This isn’t the game world. Who would attack me here? He was suddenly caught between three competing instincts. The first one was incredibly powerful. A part of him sensed the danger and felt certain an attack was about to come from somewhere, and it wanted to use Masha as a shield. Lee knew the urge, it was the Bloody Shield skill that he had gotten earlier in the colosseum, and it urged him to create a shield in the absence of one--even if it was made using another person. The second instinct was to push Masha aside and get her out of the way before something bad happened. Finally, there was the persistent thought that this wasn’t a world with violent bloodsport and roaming monsters. He needed to obey the normal rules of society, and that meant not pushing a grown woman down in the middle of the park.